The best of Tintin

The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941)Tintin in Tibet (1960)The Castafiore Emerald (1963)

To single out three essential works from an oeuvre that spans 50 years and 24 books isn't easy; especially when, as Tom McCarthy reminds us (in his wonderful Tintin and the Secret of Literature), such a body of work presents us with a unified array of symbols, signs and hidden meanings. Let no one be mistaken: the Tintin adventures are as rich in detail and intent as what is normally filed under the term "literature".

Tintin only really comes fully alive with the arrival of Captain Haddock. Broadly speaking, Tintin represents Hergé's ideal self, the perfect boy scout, idealistic, brave, pure-hearted; but there is more to people than that, so enter Haddock, the alcoholic, irascible, foul-mouthed (in a cartoonish sense: his insults are interpreted as bad language because he uses words that others do not understand) ex-sea captain. We meet him first in The Crab with the Golden Claws, drinking himself into insensibility on his own ship whose hold, without his knowledge, is stuffed with opium. Here he is a dangerous drunk, as much a menace to Tintin as any baddy, if unintentionally so. But he is Haddock; and although he did not appear in the next adventure (The Shooting Star), after that he became indispensable.

That Haddock was born as Hergé's fame was beginning to become a burden is telling. Hergé suffered with his renown, and needed a safety-valve. Towards the end of the 1950s he began to be troubled by nightmares of endless white expanses. A psychiatrist told him to cease work on Tintin; Hergé sacked the psychiatrist, and wrote Tintin in Tibet, a work filled with endless white expanses, and which exorcised so many painful ghosts that the next work he was to produce, The Castafiore Emerald, is the funniest book he ever wrote: an extraordinarily audacious yet gentle work in which, for once, there are no crimes for Tintin to solve, no criminals for him to vanquish. The price of this pre-Lapsarian condition is, of course, paid by poor Captain Haddock, whose tribulations at the hands of parrots, bees, local brass bands, builders, telephone lines, Milanese opera singers and their entourage, reporters, television crews, detectives (Thomson and Thompson, as usual) would have broken a lesser man. But it was still a holiday for Hergé. As Thomson says after Tintin retrieves Castafiore's emerald from a magpie's nest: "Just our luck! The one time we manage to catch the culprits they turn out to be innocent!"

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The last booklet in our series is essentially about journeys. Some are journeys of leisure, the kind of expeditions into faraway lands and adventures in exotic locations we loved reading about as children: tall tales about treasure islands, daredevil pilots and colonial exploits